I’m not suggesting the hashes themselves are illegal to possess, but that transferring the bytes corresponding to those hashes is problematic: if both sides are lowly trusted, that puts you at risk as a hoster of that content. This is indeed an issue with IPFS, for instance, where I believe the solutions are “pinning” content that is already vetted by another party, or denylists of “bad bits”. I assume it’s similar to any other clearnet hosting. Btw, I make zero value judgments about all of that.

Off topic: I see downvotes on my parent comment, please let me know if I said something bad to help me improve.

Shared bytes could be construed in the opposite direction: if two or more of my users have the same chunk in their files, it is more likely to be some legal piece of data.

Files become piracy when there is evidence of intentional copyright infringement, for example when the chunk is part of a valid MPEG4 file and the MPEG4 file is titled "Wednesday_S2E4_FullHD_NetflixRip.MP4"

Re last para: probably because it's full of very certain, but also quite certainly wrong, statements along the lines of "Under current legal doctrine, blobs need some form of chain of custody." Citation needed.

I can see how that’s overly assuming. Thanks for being candid.

It's not the illegalness I'm challenging, it's the problematicness. Maybe it is illegal to even think about those bit patterns. But I'm not aware of cases where people get _actually_ thrown in jail or fined for possessing or transmitting them. In all of the cases I know about there is intent involved.

It is hard to tell if this is what you are saying. But a common misconception of ipfs seems to be that you may end up hosting random unwanted files. this is untrue, you only end up hosting files you want.